THE DOUGHBOY MOVES TOWARD THE FRONT
By July, 1917, the first Divisions of our amazing army began to seep
into the battle countries of Europe. It had not been the intention of
either our War Department or its general staff to send the army overseas
until the first of 1918; the entire plan of organization and preparation
here in the United States had been predicated upon such a program. Yet
the situation overseas was dire indeed. Three years of warfare--and such
warfare--had begun to fag even the indomitable spirits of England and of
France. The debacle of Russia was ever before the eyes of these nations.
In the words of their own leaders, their morale was at its lowest point.
France, in one glorious moment in 1917, had seemed, under the leadership
of Nivelle, to be close to the turning point toward victory. But she had
seen herself miss the point, and was forced again in rugged doggedness
to stand stoutly with England and hold the line for the democracy of the
world.
In such an hour there was no opportunity for delay; not even for the
slight delay incidental to raising an American Army of a mere half
million, training it in the simplest possible fashion, and then
dispatching it overseas. Such a method would have been more gratifying
to our military pride. We sacrificed that pride, and shall never regret
the hour of that decision. We first sent hospital detachments from our
army medical service to be brigaded with the British, who seemed to have
suffered their most severe losses in their hospital staffs, and sent
engineer regiments not only to build the United States Military
Railroad, of which you have already read, but also to aid the weakened
land transport sections of the French and British armies. And General
John J. Pershing, with adequate staff assistance, crossed to Paris to
prepare for the first and all-glorious American campaign in Europe.
[Illustration: OUR RED CROSS AT THE FRONT
A typical A. R. C. dugout just behind the lines]
"The program had been carefully drawn up," wrote Lieutenant Colonel
Repington, the distinguished British military critic, in a review on the
performance of our army in the _London Morning Post_, of December 9,
1918. "It anticipated the orderly arrival in France of complete units,
with all their services, guns, transport, and horses, and when these
larger units had received a finishing course in France and had been
trained up to concert pitch it was intended to put them into the line
and build up a purely American Army as rapidly as possible. After
studying the situation, the program and the available tonnage in those
days, I did not expect that General Pershing could take the field with a
trained army of accountable numbers much before the late summer or
autumn of 1918."
Yet by the first day of January, 1918, there were already in France four
American Divisions, each with an approximate strength of 28,153 men, by
February there were six Divisions, and by March, eight. It is fair to
say, however, that even by March only two of the Divisions were fit to
be in the line, and none in the other active sectors. Training for
modern warfare is indeed an arduous task. Yet our amazing army did not
shirk it, and even in the dispiriting and terrifying days of the spring
of 1918 kept to its task of preparing itself for the great ordeal just
ahead, and, almost at the very hour that the last great German drive
began to assume really serious proportions, was finishing those
preparations. Ten Divisions were ready, before the spring was well
advanced, to stand shoulder to shoulder with British Divisions should
such an unusual course have been found indispensable. In fact,
anticipating this very emergency, brigading with the British had already
been begun. But as the British reinforcements began pouring into
Northern France the possibilities of the emergency arising diminished.
And five of our Divisions were returned south into the training camps
of the United States Army.
The War Department figures of the size of our army in France throughout
1918--which at the time could not be made public, because of military
necessities--tell the story of its rapid growth. They show the number of
Divisions in France and in line and in reserve to have been as follows:
_1918 In France In Line and Reserve_
April 1 10 3
May 13 4
June 16 6
July 24 9
August 32 20
September 37 25
October 40 31
November 42 30
This tabulation takes no count whatsoever of the noncombatants of the S.
O. S.--as the army man knows the Service of Supplies--or the other great
numbers of men employed in the rearward service of the United States
Army. It is perhaps enough to say that the largest number of our troops
employed in France was on September 26, the day that General Pershing
began his Meuse-Argonne offensive. On that day our army consisted of
1,224,720 combatants and 493,764 noncombatants, a total of 1,718,484 men
in its actual forces.
It is known now that if the war had continued we should probably have
doubled those figures within a comparatively few months and should have
had eighty Divisions in France by April, 1919, which would have made the
United States Army by all odds the most considerable of any of the
single belligerent nations fighting in France.
We have told elsewhere a little of the romance of the transport of our
men; here in cold figures--statistics which scorn romance in their
composition--is their result. We shall see through our Red Cross
spectacles again and again the performances of that army, as the men
and the women of the American Red Cross saw them.
In the meantime let us turn again, therefore, to Lieutenant Colonel
Repington, whose reputation in this regard is well established, and find
him saying of the commanding general of our army:
"To my mind, there is nothing finer in the war than the splendid good
comradeship which General Pershing displayed throughout, and nothing
more striking than the determined way in which he pursued the original
American plan of making the American arms both respected and feared. The
program of arrivals, speeded up and varied in response to the appeal of
the Allies, involved him in appalling difficulties, from which the
American army suffered to the last. His generous answer to cries for
help in other sectors left him for long stretches almost, if not quite,
without an army. He played the game like a man by his friends, but all
the time with a singleness of purpose and a strength of character which
history will applaud; he kept his eyes fixed on the great objective
which he ultimately attained and silenced his detractors in attaining
it. To his calm and steadfast spirit we owe much. To his staff, cool
amidst the most disturbing events, impervious to panic, rapid in
decision, and quick to act, the allied world owes a tribute. To his
troops, what can we say? They were crusaders. They came to beat the
Germans and they beat them soundly. They worthily maintained the
tradition of their race. They fought and won for an idea."
Truer words have not been written. To one who has made even a
superficial study of our army in France, the figure of the doughboy--the
boy from the little home in Connecticut or Kansas or Oregon--looms large
indeed. I did not, myself, see him in action. Other and abler pens have
told and are still telling of his unselfishness, his audacity, his
seemingly unbounded heroism both in the trenches and upon the open field
of battle. The little rows of crosses in the shattered forest of the
Argonne or upon the roads leading from Paris into Château-Thierry,
elsewhere over the face of lovely France, tell the story of his
sacrifice more graphically than any pen may ever tell it.
Frequently I have seen the doughboy in Paris as well as in the other
cities and towns and in our military camps in France. He is an amusing
fellow. One can hardly fail to like him. I have talked with him--by the
dozens and by the hundreds. I have argued with him, for sometimes we
have failed to agree. But I have never failed to sympathize, or to
understand. Nor, as for that matter, to appreciate. No one who has seen
the performance of our amazing army in France, or the immediate results
of that performance, can fail to appreciate. If you are a finicky person
you may easily see the defects that haste brought into the making of our
expeditionary army--waste in material and in personnel here and there;
but, after all, these very defects are almost inherent in any
organization raised to meet a supreme emergency, and they appear
picayune indeed when one places them alongside the marvel of its
performance--when one thinks of Château-Thierry or Saint Mihiel or the
Argonne.
* * * * *
It is not the province of this book to describe the operations of our
army in France except in so far as they were touched directly by the
operations of our Red Cross over there. So, back to our text. You will
recall that Major Grayson M.-P. Murphy, our first Red Cross Commissioner
to France, and his staff arrived in Paris coincidently with General
Pershing on the thirteenth of June, 1917. They went right to work,
despite terrific odds, in the building of a working organization. At
about the hour of their coming there was developing here in the United
States a rather distinct feeling in certain widespread religious and
philanthropic organizations that they should be distinctly represented
in our war enterprise in Europe. The patriotism that stirred these great
organizations was admirable; it was unmistakable, and finally resulted
in certain of the larger ones--the Young Men's Christian Association,
the Knights of Columbus, the Young Women's Christian Association and the
Salvation Army--being given definite status in the war work overseas. In
the case of the Y. M. C. A.--by far the largest of all these
organizations--it was allotted the major problem of providing
entertainment for the enlisted men and the officers at the camps in
France, in England, in Italy and, in due time, in the German valley of
the Rhine. At a later hour the very difficult problem of providing
canteens, that would be, in effect, nothing more nor less than huge post
exchanges, was thrust upon the Y. M. C. A. It accepted the problem--not
gladly, but in patriotic spirit--and even though the experiment brought
upon its shoulders much thoughtless and bitter criticism, saw it bravely
through.
The Y. M. C. A. therefore, was to undertake, speaking by and large, the
canteen problem of the camps, while that of the hospitals, the docks at
the ports of debarkation and embarkation, the railroad junctions, and
the cities of France was handed to the American Red Cross. The Red Cross
began its preparations for this particular part of its task by
establishing stations for the French Army, which, pending the arrival of
the American forces, would serve admirably as experiment stations. Major
Murphy at once conferred with the French military authorities and, after
finding from them where their greatest need lay, proceeded without delay
to the establishment of model canteens on the French lines of
communication; in the metropolitan zone of Paris and at the front. And
before our army came, and the great bulk of the work of our Red Cross
naturally shifted to it, these early canteens supplied rations to
literally millions of French soldiers.
* * * * *
"In view of keeping up the good spirits of troops it is indispensable
that soldiers on leave be able to find, while waiting at railroad
stations in the course of their journeys, canteens which will allow
them to have comfortable rest and refreshment. Good results have already
been obtained in this direction, but it is necessary to improve the
canteens already existing and to create new ones in stations that do not
already have them."
The above is a translation of a quotation from a note written by the
French Minister of War to a general of his army, at about the time of
our first Red Cross Commission over there. If one were to attempt to
translate between the lines he would be certain to find that the
soldiers going home on leave or discharge, obliged to wait long hours in
railroad stations, sometimes without food or other comforts, and
ofttimes, too, forced to sleep upon a cold, stone-flagged floor, had
often a greatly lowered morale as the result of such an experience. And
if their mental state was not lowered, their physical condition was
almost sure to be.
So it was that the American Red Cross jumped into the immediate
assistance of its rather badly burdened French brothers--the various
organizations of _Croix Rouge Française_. It seized as its most
immediate opportunity, Paris, and particularly the junction points of
the _Grande Ceinture_, the belt-line railroad which completely encircles
the outer environs of the city, and provides track-interchange
facilities for the various trunk-line railroads which enter her walls
from every direction. For lack of funds and a lack of personnel the
French Red Cross authorities were about to close some of the canteens
which they already had established upon the _Grande Ceinture_, while the
real necessity was that more should be opened. Such a disaster our
American Red Cross prevented. On July 18, 1917, Colonel Payot, Director
of the French Army Transports, wrote to H. H. Harjes--at that time
representative of the American Red Cross at the general headquarters of
the French Army--giving a list of railroad stations where canteens were
needed, and in the order of their urgency. In the correspondence which
followed between the French authorities and the American Red Cross,
various agreements were reached.
It was agreed that the French administration would furnish the necessary
buildings and provide electric light, running water, and coal for
heating. On the other hand, the American Red Cross undertook to furnish
all other supplies--cooking appliances, coal for cooking, equipment,
stores, medical supplies, and personnel. As early as July 31, Major
Perkins wrote that our American Red Cross was now ready to serve a full
meal at seventy-five centimes (fourteen or fifteen cents) a person, and
other drinks and dishes at small cost to the _poilu_. Men without funds
on receiving a voucher from the _Commissaire de la Gare_
(railroad-station agent) could obtain meals and hot drinks without
charge. The sale of wine, beer, and spirits was prohibited in our
canteens. And because of the French coöperation in their establishment,
they were named _Les Cantines des Deux Drapeaux_ and bore signs showing
both the Tricolor of France and our own Stars and Stripes, with their
designating name beneath.
The original list of outside stations suggested by the French
authorities were five in number: Pont d'Oye, Châlons, Épernay, Belfort,
and Bar-le-Duc. Finally it was decided to reduce this list--the hour of
the arrival of the American forces in number steadily drawing
nearer--and Châlons and Épernay were definitely chosen for American Red
Cross canteen work. At that time both of these cities of the Champagne
district were well behind the lines; afterwards the Germans came too
close for comfort and shelled them badly, which meant the withdrawal of
the French troops and a closing of the neat canteens for a time; but
they were reopened. When I visited Épernay in January 1919, the Red
Cross canteen there was again open and in charge of two young ladies
from Watertown, N. Y.--the Misses Emma and Kate Lansing, sisters of the
then Secretary of State. You could not keep down the buoyant spirit of
our Red Cross.
Before the American Red Cross undertook to establish fully equipped
canteens--on the scale of those at Châlons and at Épernay--the London
Committee of the French Red Cross had been operating at many railroad
stations small canteens known as the _Gouttes de Café_, where coffee and
bouillon were served free to the soldiers in passing trains. In several
cases agreements were made with the French society by which certain
individual _Gouttes de Café_ passed to the control of the American Red
Cross and were, in other cases, absorbed in the larger installation
which it was prepared to support. This, however, took place only when
the demands of the situation really called for a larger canteen,
prepared to serve full meals and operate dormitories and a recreation
room. Occasionally it was found advisable for our Red Cross to
inaugurate a canteen of its very own, while the _Goutte de Café_
continued to carry on its own work on the station platform or in the
immediate vicinity.
I remember particularly the situation in the great central station of
the Midi Railroad in Bordeaux. This huge structure is a real focal point
of passenger traffic. From beneath its expansive train shed trains come
and go; to and from Paris and Boulogne and Biarritz and Marseilles and
many other points--over the busy lines, not only of the Midi, but of the
Paris-Orléans and the Etat. A great proportion of this traffic is
military, and long ago the French Red Cross sought to accommodate this
with a huge _Goutte de Café_ in a barnlike sort of room in the main
station structure and opening direct upon its platforms. I glanced at
this place. It was gloomy and ill-lighted by the uncertain, even though
dazzling, glow of one or two electric arc lights. It was fearfully
overcrowded. _Poilus_ occupied each of the many seats in the room and
flowed over to the floor, where they sat or reclined as best they might
on the benches or on their luggage. The place was ill-ventilated, too.
It was not one that offered large appeal.
How different the appearance of the canteen of our own Red Cross. It
had a far less advantageous location; well outside the station train
shed and only to be found by one who was definitely directed to it. Two
buildings had been erected and another adapted for the canteen. They
were plain enough outside, but inside they were typically
American--which meant that light and color and warmth had been combined
effectively to produce the effect of a home that might have been in
Maine, or Ohio, or Colorado, or California, or any other nice corner of
the old U. S. A. There was homelike atmosphere, too, in the long, low
buildings enhanced by the unforgetable aroma of coffee being made--being
made American style, if you please. That building boasted a long
counter, and upon the counter miniature mountains of ham sandwiches and
big brown doughnuts--sandwiches and doughnuts which actually had been
fabricated from white flour--and ham sandwiches with a genuine flavor to
them. And all in great quantity--2,000 meals in a single day was no
unusual order--and for a price that was nominal, to put it lightly.
In another building there were more of the lights and the warm yellows
and greens of good taste in decoration; a big piano with a doughboy at
it some twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four--whole companies of
divans and regiments of easy-chairs: American newspapers, many weekly
publications, a lot of magazines, and books in profusion. The room was
completely filled, but somehow one did not gain the sensation of its
being crowded. The feeling that one carried from the place was that a
bit of the U. S. A. had been set right down there at the corner of the
great and busy chief railway terminal of the French city of Bordeaux.
Only one forgot Bordeaux.
* * * * *
What was done at Bordeaux--and also at St. Nazaire and Nantes and Brest
and Tours and Toul and many, many other points--by our Red Cross in the
provision of canteen facilities was repeated in Paris, only on a far
larger scale than at any other point. The A. R. C. L. O. C. canteens in
Paris--there seems to be no holding in check that army passion for
initialization--soon after the signing of the armistice had reached
fourteen in number, of which about half were located in or close to the
great railroad passenger terminals of the city. The others were hotels,
large or small, devoted in particular to the housing of the doughboy and
his officers on the occasions of their leaves to the capital--for no
other point in France, not even the attractions of Biarritz or the sunny
Riviera, can ever quite fill the place in the heart of the man in khaki
that Paris, with all her refinements and her infinite variety of
amusements, long since attained. These last canteens we shall consider
in greater detail when we come to find our doughboy on leave. For the
present we are seeing him still bound for the front, the war still in
action, the great adventure still ahead.
A single glance at the records of the organization of the Army and Navy
Department under which the canteen work along the lines of communication
is grouped at the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross, shows
that it was not until February, 1918, that the inrush of the American
Army in France had assumed proportions ample enough to demand a
segregation of canteen accommodations for it from those offered to the
_poilus_. As I have said, the canteens for the _poilus_ were in the
general nature of training or experimental stations for our really big
canteen job over there, and as such more than justified the trouble or
the cost; which does not take into the reckoning the valuable service
which they rendered the blue-clad soldiers of our great and loyal
friend--the French Republic.
Take Châlons, for instance: Châlons set an American Red Cross standard
for canteens, particularly for such canteens as would have to take care
of the physical needs and comforts of soldiers, perhaps in great
numbers. This early Red Cross station was set in a large barracks some
fifty yards distant from the chief railroad terminal of that busy town.
And, as it often happened that the leave permits of the _poilus_ did
not permit them to go into the town, a fenced passage, with a sentinel,
was builded from the train platforms to the canteen entrance. At that
entrance, a coat room where the soldier could check his bulky kit was
established.
On going into the restaurant of the canteen one quickly discovered that
what might otherwise have been a dull and dreary barracks' interior had
been transformed by French artists--the French have a marvelous knack
for doing this very sort of thing--into a light, cheerful, and amusing
room. The effect on the _poilus_ who visited it for the first time was
instantaneous; they had not been used to that sort of thing.
At one end of the gay and happy room was the counter from which the
meals were served by the American women working in the canteen. The
soldier went first to the cashier and from her bought either a ticket
for a complete meal, or for any special dish that might appeal to his
fancy or to his jaded appetite. He then went to the counter, was handed
his food on a tray, and took it to one of the clean, white-tiled tables
that lined the room. Groups of friends might gather at a table. But no
one was long alone, unless he chose to be. Friendships are made quickly
in the spirit of such a place, and the chatter and laughter that
pervaded it reflected the gayety of its decorations.
After eating, if it was still summer, the _poilu_ might stroll in the
garden where there were seats, a pergola, even a Punch and Judy
Theater--for your Frenchman, be he Parisian or peasant, dearly loves his
_guignol_--or he might find his way to the recreation room, where there
were writing materials, games, magazines, lounging chairs, a piano and a
victrola. Here men might group around the piano and sing to their
hearts' content. And here the popularity of _Madelon_ was quite
unquestioned.
And after all of this was done, he might retire to the dormitories with
absolute assurance that he would be called in full time for his
train--whether that train left at one o'clock in the morning or at
four. And if he so chose, in the morning might refresh himself in the
fully equipped washrooms, shower baths, or the barber shop, have his
coffee and eggs, his fruit and his beloved _confiture_ and go aboard the
train in the full spirit of a man at complete peace with the world.
* * * * *
The orders that came in February, 1918, calling for the segregation of
the accommodations for the A. E. F. from those given to the French, did
not result in withdrawing financial support from Châlons and the other
canteens which our Red Cross had established particularly for the
_poilus_, but did result in the establishment of rest stations, or
canteens, exclusively for our own men. This organization of canteens
extended particularly along the lines of communication between the area
of action and the Service of Supplies zone, and was quite distinct from
the canteen organizations at the ports and the evacuation hospitals;
these last we shall come to consider when we see the part played by our
Red Cross in the entire hospital program of the A. E. F. The Lines of
Communication task was a real job in itself.
One could hardly rub the side of a magic lamp and have a completely
equipped canteen materialize as the fulfillment of a wish. Magic lamps
have not been particularly numerous in France these last few years. If
they had been France might have been spared at least some of her great
burden of sorrow. And so, even for our resourceful Red Cross, buildings
could not always be provided, nor chairs, nor counters, nor even stoves.
That is why at Vierzon, a little but a very busy railroad junction near
Nevers, there was, for many months, only a tent. But for each dawn of
all those months there was the cheering aroma of fresh coffee steaming
up into the air from six _marmites_, as the French know our giant coffee
containers. And the figures of American girls could be seen silhouetted
against the glow of bonfires, while the line of soldiers, cups in hand,
which started at that early hour, would continue for at least another
eighteen, or until well after midnight.
Remember, if you will, that making coffee for a canteen is not making it
for a household dining room. One does not measure it by teaspoonfuls. It
is an affair of pounds and of gallons. The water--ten gallons for each
_marmite_--was procured from a well which had been tested and adjudged
pure. The sandwiches, with their fillings of meat or of jelly, were not
the dainty morsels which women crumble between their fingers at bridge
parties. They were sandwiches fit for fighting men. They were the sort
that hungry soldiers could grip with their teeth.
Because of the necessary secrecy in reference to the exact numbers of
passing troops, in turn because of military necessities, the American
Red Cross was not permitted during the war to keep an exact record of
the number of men who visited its canteens. But where hundreds were
accommodated, even at as comparatively small a place as Vierzon,
thousands were fed at the larger places, such as Dijon or Toul, for
instance. And it is to be noted that in all these canteens food was
being served to regular detachments of the A. E. F. as well as to
casuals leaving or rejoining their commands.
In the great September drive of 1918 a canteen was set up by the
roadside at Souilly. Night and day and without intermission it was
maintained. It was there that stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers
were given hot drinks and warm food--all that they wanted of both--and
where sometimes they toppled over from sheer fatigue and wearied nerves.
From this one tent--and this is but one instance typical of many, many
others--three hundred gallons of chocolate were served daily. And while
bread was procured with the utmost difficulty, no boy was turned away
hungry. Many times the snacks of food so offered were, according to the
statements of the soldiers themselves, the first food that they had
received for three days.
And whether the canteen of our Red Cross was in a tent or a pine
structure with splintery and badly put together walls, or, as ofttimes
it was, in the corner of a baggage room of a railroad station, an
attempt was always made to beautify it. We learned several things from
the French since first we moved a part of America into their beloved
land, and this was one of them. The example of the Châlons canteen was
not lost. There is a psychological effect in decorative beauty that is
quite unmistakable; translated it has a definite and very real effect
upon that important thing that all really great army generals of to-day
know as morale. It was the desire for good morale, therefore, that
prompted the women of our Red Cross to decorate their canteens. And
because skilled decorative artists were not always at hand, as they were
as Châlons, makeshifts--ingenious ones at that--were often used.
Magazine covers could be fashioned into mighty fine wall posters. In
some instances, camouflage artists and their varied paint pots were
called into service. For window curtains materials of gay colors were
always chosen and, wherever it was possible, the lights were covered
with fancy shades, designed according to the individual taste or the
ingenuity of some worker.
Pianos were dug out of ruined houses or were even brought from captured
German dugouts. A _boche_ piano served as well as any other for the
"jazz" which we took to poor France from the United States. The pianos
in these Red Cross canteens hardly would have passed muster for a formal
concert. But that did not matter much. It mattered not that they had the
toothless look of old age about them, where the ivory keys had been
lost; they were still something which a homeless Yankee boy might
play--where he might still build for himself a bridge of favorite tunes
right back into the heart of his own beloved home.
At Issoudon, the canteen reached an ideal of organization not always
possible in some more isolated spots. At that point there was a mess
for officers, a canteen for enlisted men, and clubrooms with books and
the like for both. Moreover, a resthouse was inaugurated for officers
and men by the Red Cross for the accommodation of those who stayed there
overnight or even for a considerable number of hours. Eventually this
last project was absorbed by the army, which took it under its direct
control. The army knew a good thing when it saw it. The Issoudon
resthouse was a good thing. It served as a model for a much more
elaborate scheme of entertainment for our khaki-coated men which, at a
later time, was established by the American Red Cross in Paris. And
which--so far at least as the officers were concerned--also was taken
over by the army.
"A piece of fairyland" was the name that a doughboy with a touch of
sentiment gave to the canteen at Nevers. A gardener's lodge attached to
a château was loaned the American Red Cross by a titled and generous
lady. It possessed a "living room" and a dining room that needed few
changes, even of a decorative order. Upon the veranda, which commanded a
view of a gentle and seemingly perennial garden, were many easy-chairs,
while somewhere among these same hardy flowers was builded a temporary
barracks for the housing of casuals and for shower baths for the cleanly
comfort of the guests.
* * * * *
In the course of my own travels through the Red Cross areas in Europe I
came to another canteen center other than that of the Bordeaux district,
which still clings to my memory. I am referring to Toul, that ancient
walled city of eastern France which has been a great fortress for so
many centuries that mortal man seems fairly to have lost count of them.
Few doughboys there are who traveled at all across the land of the
lilies who can easily forget Toul--that grim American army headquarters
close by its stone walls and ancient gates, a _marais_ of tight-set
buildings and narrow stone-paved streets and encircled by a row of
hills, which bore a row of fortresses. If the line had failed to hold at
Verdun or at Pont-à-Mousson, Toul would certainly have become the next
great battle ground, another gray city for which men might give their
short lives in order that it might continue its long one.
This "if" was not realized--thank God for that! And the French, with
their real generosity, realizing that the American headquarters in their
eastern territory must be a city of great accessibility and real
military strategic importance, quickly tendered Toul, which was accepted
by our army in the same generous spirit in which it was offered by our
Allies.
With Toul settled as a military center the problem of the Red Cross in
connection with it at once became definite and important. It, of course,
demanded immediate as well as entirely comprehensive solution. And that
it had both was due very largely to the efforts of one woman, Miss Mary
Vail Andress, of New York.
Miss Andress, who was one of the very first group of women to be sent by
our Red Cross to France, arriving there August 24, 1917, came to Toul in
January, 1918. Captain Hugh Pritchitt, who had been assigned to the
command of the American Red Cross work at that American Army
headquarters point, already of great and growing importance, had
preceded her there by but four days, yet had already succeeded in making
a definite survey of the entire situation. Out of that survey, and the
more extended knowledge of the problem that came to the Red Cross folk
as they studied it in its details, came the big canteen activities. For
before the American Red Cross had been in the ancient French town a full
fortnight, the men of the American Expeditionary Forces began pouring
through it in great numbers. It takes only a single glance at the map to
realize the reason why; for to the east of Toul are Nancy,
Pont-à-Mousson, and the Lorraine line, while to the north and even a
little to the west one finds Saint Mihiel, Verdun, St. Menehold, and the
Argonne--places that already are household names all the way across
America, while from Toul to the south and west, even unto the blue
waters of the Atlantic, stretch the main stems of the United States
Military Railroad in France--that remarkable railroad which, as you
already know, really is no railroad whatsoever.
So do not wonder that at the ancient railway station just north of the
town walls and contiguous to the well-traveled Route de Paris, 1918 saw
more and more of the long special trains stopping and debouching boys in
khaki--hungry boys, thirsty boys, tired and dirty boys, and no provision
for the relief of any of these ordinary human miseries.
It was a real situation, and as such the New York woman in the steel
gray Red Cross uniform quickly sensed it. She moved toward its solution;
which was easier said than done. For one thing the Red Cross chiefs in
Paris, considering the thing judiciously from long range, were not at
all sure of its practicability. But Miss Andress had no doubts, and so
persisted at Paris until Paris yielded and permission was granted her to
start a small canteen; yet this was only the first step in the solution
of her problem. A second and even greater one was the securing of a
location for canteen facilities. The meager facilities of Toul, selected
as the field headquarters of an American Army, had been all but swamped
by the fearful demands made upon them. Yet Miss Andress, moving heaven
and earth itself, did secure a small apartment house in that same
well-traveled Route de Paris, which was well enough, so far as it went,
but did not go half far enough. She quickly determined that this
building would serve very well as a hotel or resthouse for the casual
soldiers and officers passing through the town, but that the real
canteen would have to be right at the station itself.
Now the station of the Eastern Railway at Toul was amply large for the
ordinary peace-time needs of the eleven thousand folk who lived in the
town, but long since its modest facilities had also been swamped by the
war-time necessities thrust upon it. It was humanly impossible to crowd
another single facility within its four tight brick walls. They told her
as much.
"I know that," said Miss Andress quietly. "We shall have to have a big
tent set up in the station yard. I shall speak to the railway
authorities about it, and gain their permission."
In vain the army officers argued with her as to the futility of such a
step. They, themselves, had thought of such procedure for their own
increasing activities, but had been refused a tent, very politely but
very firmly. Yet those refusals were not final. There were two other
factors now to be taken into consideration--one was the potency of the
very phrase, _Croix Rouge Américaine_, with the French, and the other
was the persuasive ability of a bright New York woman who, having made
up her mind what it was that she wanted to get, was not going to be
happy until she had gotten it.
She got the tent--the permission and all else that went with the getting
it up, of course. In the spring of 1919 it still was there, although in
use as a check room instead of a canteen; for the canteen service long
before had outgrown even its generous facilities. It spread in various
directions; into a regular hotel for enlisted men, right across the
narrow street from the station; a resthouse for both officers and
enlisted men back on the Route de Paris about a block distant; a huge
new canteen on the station grounds, and still another on one of the long
island-platforms between the tracks, so that men held in passing
trains--all of which stopped at Toul for coal and water, if nothing
else--and so unable to go even into the station to feel the comforting
hand of the Red Cross, might be served with good things of both food and
drink.
To maintain four such great institutions, even though all of them were
within a stone's throw of one another, was no child's play. The mere
problem of providing those good things to eat and drink was of itself a
really huge job. For by January, 1919, in the sandwich room of the
enlisted men's hotel across the street, 2,400 pounds of bread a day were
being cut into sandwiches. These sandwiches were worthy of
investigation. They were really worth-while--the Red Cross kind. I have
sampled them myself--all the way from Havre to Coblenz and south as far
as Bordeaux, and so truthfully can call them remarkable. For fancy, if
you can, corned beef--the miserable and despised "corn willie" of the
doughboy--being so camouflaged with pickles and onions and eggs as to
make many and many a traveling hungry soldier for the nonce quite
unaware that he was munching upon a foodstuff of unbridled army
ridicule. And ham, with mustard, and more of the palatable camouflage.
Oh, boy, could you beat it? And, oh, boy, did you ever eat better
doughnuts--outside of mother's, of course--than those of the Red Cross,
and the Salvation Army, too, gave you?
In the big kitchen of the American Red Cross canteen hotel at Toul they
cooked three thousand of these last each twenty-four hours, which would
have been a sizable contract for one of those white-fronted chains of
dairy restaurants whose habitat is New York and the other big cities of
the United States, while four thousand cups of coffee and chocolate went
daily to wash down these doughnuts--and the sandwiches.
Figures are not always impressive. In this one instance, however, I
think that they are particularly so. Is it not impressive to know that
in a single day of September, 1918, when the tide of war had turned and
the oncoming hosts of Yanks were turning the flanks of the _boche_
farther and farther back, ground once lost never to be regained--in the
eight hours of that day, from five o'clock in the morning until one
o'clock in the afternoon, just 2,045 men were served by the American Red
Cross there at the Toul station, while in the month of January, 1919,
just 128,637 hungry soldiers were fed and refreshed there?
Figures do not, of course, tell the story of the resthouse--that
apartment home first secured by Miss Andress--but the expressions of
gratefulness that come from the fortunate folk who have been sheltered
beneath its hospitable roof are more than ordinarily eloquent. It is not
a large building; a structure rather ugly than otherwise. But it has
spelled in every true sense of the word: "Rest." Yet to my mind its
really unique distinction lies in another channel; it is the only army
facility that I chanced to see in all France which extended its
hospitality under a single roof to both officer and enlisted man, and so
bespoke a democracy which, much vaunted at times, does not always exist
within the ranks of the United States Army. For so far as I could
discover, there was not the slightest particle of difference in the
cleanliness and comfort between the beds assigned to the enlisted men in
the upper floor of the house and those given to the officers in its two
lower floors. When they passed its threshold the fine distinction of
rank ceased. The Red Cross in its very best phases does not recognize
the so-called distinction of rank.
* * * * *
Its hospitality at Toul did not cease when it had offered food and drink
and lodging to the man in khaki who came to its doors. A very humble yet
greatly appreciated comfort to a man coming off a hot, overcrowded, and
very dirty troop train was nothing more nor less than a good bath. The
bathhouse was a hurried but well-adapted one in the basement of the
enlisted men's hotel. Two Russian refugees ran the plant and did well at
it--for Russian refugees. A system was adopted, despite Slavic
traditions, by which at a single time sixteen men might be undressing,
sixteen taking a quarter-hour bath, and a third sixteen dressing
again--all at the same time. In this way 250 men could bathe in a single
hour, while the daily average of the institution during the busy months
of the war ordinarily ran from eight hundred to nine hundred. It has
handled 1,200 in a single working day, giving the men not only a bath,
hot or cold, as might be desired, but a complete change of clean
underclothing--all with the compliments of the Red Cross. The discarded
garments were gathered in huge sacks, some twenty-five of these being
forwarded daily to the army laundries in the neighborhood.
* * * * *
"The Red Cross in Toul?" said a young lieutenant of engineers one day to
Miss Gladys Harrison, who was working there for the American Red Cross.
"It saved my life one forlorn night. Every hotel in town was full to the
doors, it was raining bullets outside and no place to sleep but the
banks of the canal, if--if the Red Cross hadn't taken me in."
Let Miss Harrison continue the story; she was extremely conversant with
the entire situation in Toul, and so most capable to speak of it.
"It was the hour of tea when the young man came in. In fresh white
_coif_ and apron of blue, a Red Cross girl presided behind the altar of
the sacred institution, where the pot simmered and lemon and sugar
graced the brew. In a charmed circle around the attractively furnished
room which, among its other attractions, boasted a piano, a pretty
reading lamp, and a writing desk, sat some fifteen other officers--most
of them dusty and tired from long traveling, some shy, some talkative,
two gray-bearded, most of them mere boys, all warming themselves in the
civilizing atmosphere of the subtle ceremony. On the table piled on a
generous dinner plate was the marvel on which the young lieutenant's
eyes rested--doughnuts.
"Forty-eight thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five doughnuts. Not to be
sure, all on that dinner plate--the great number is that of the
doughnuts officially stirred up, dropped in deep fat, and distributed
from the Red Cross houses and station canteens during the month of July,
1918. Other good things were served in a similar abundance that same
month; 19,760 hot and cold drinks, 13,546 sandwiches, and 19,574
tartines, not to mention 2,460 salads and 4,160 dishes of ice
cream--these last, of course, special hot-weather foods. But the
doughnuts were the pride and glory of the Toul establishment--the
masterpiece by which its praises were known and sung in the long
trenches that scarred the fair Lorraine hills. They were the real
American article--except also for the traditional rolling in the sugar
barrel, now vanished like the dodo--soft and golden and winningly round.
They were made by a Frenchwoman, but her instructor was a genuine Yankee
soldier cook, who learned the art from his mother in the Connecticut
Valley, where they cherish the secret of why the doughnut has a hole. He
was particularly detailed to initiate the Frenchwoman into the mysteries
of the art by an army colonel who understood doughnuts and men and who
sat at tea with the directress one day when the Red Cross outpost at
Toul still was young."
The directress was, of course, Miss Andress, and it was in those early
days she still was the staff and the staff was the directress; and never
dreaming of the summer nights when her commodious resthouse in the Route
de Paris, with its accommodations for eight men and twenty-five
officers, would be called upon in a single short month to take care of
560 officers and 2,124 enlisted men--and would take care of every
blessed one of them to the fullest extent.
* * * * *
Enough again of figures. At the best they tell only part of the story.
The boys who enjoyed the multifold hospitalities of the Red Cross in
Toul--that quaint, walled, and moated fortress town of old France, with
its churches and its exquisite cathedral rising above its low
roofs--could tell the rest of it; and gladly did when the opportunity
was given them. For instance here is a human document which came into my
hands one day when I was at the Toul canteen:
"_Dear Red Cross Girls at the Canteen_:
"I always wanted to tell you how I appreciated all the nice
things you have done for us since I have been over here and
would have, but perhaps you'd think I was making love to you for
I felt I wanted to get you in a great big bunch and give you a
great big hug. No, I wouldn't need any moonlight and shivery
music, for it isn't that kind of a hug--the kind of hug I wanted
to give is the kind a brother gives his sister; or a boy gives
his mother when he wants her to know that he loves her and
appreciates her.... You girls are for the boys of the fighting
power and you don't ask any questions and you don't bestow any
special favors and so we all love you.
"(A soldier) MR. BUCK PRIVATE."
Sometimes actions speak louder than words. There came a time--in
September, 1918--when the troops were moving pretty steadily through
Toul and up toward the Argonne. The Red Cross girls were hard put to it
to see that all the boys had all the food and drink and lodgings and
baths that they wanted; but they saw that these were given and in
generous measure, even though it meant ten and twelve and fourteen and
even sixteen hours of work at a stretch. They had their full reward for
their strenuous endeavors, not always in letters, or even in words.
Sometimes the language of expression of the human face is the most
convincing thing in all the world.
It was a boy from Grand Island, Nebraska, who slouched into the Toul
canteen in the station yard on one of the hottest of those September
nights. He was tired and dirty, and his seventy-five pounds of equipment
upon his back must almost have been more than mortal might bear. But he
did not complain--it was not the way of the doughboy. He merely shoved
his pack off upon the floor and inquired in a quiet, tired voice:
"Anything that you can spare me, missy?"
He got it. Sandwiches, coffee, the promise of a bath; finally the bath
itself.... When the boy--he was indeed hardly more than a boy despite
his six feet of stature--left the Red Cross colony he had been fairly
transformed. He was cleaner, cooler, almost younger, and seeping over
with appreciation.
"It was wonderful," he blurted out. "I'd like to thank you--in a
practical way, sort of. Let me send you something down from the front--a
souvenir like."
The Red Cross girl who had first taken him in tow and to whom he was now
talking did not fully comprehend his remark. Another boy from another
Grand Island already was engrossing her attention. But the word
"souvenir" registered ever and ever so slightly.
"Get me a German," she said laughingly and lightly as she gave him her
name, and turned to the boy from the other Grand Island.
In a few days it came; a sizable pasteboard box by Uncle Sam's own army
parcel post over there in France.
The girl opened it quickly. There it all was--the revolver, the helmet,
the wallet, with all the German small change, the cigarette case, all
the small accouterments of a private in an infantry regiment, even down
to the buttons. In the package was a roughly written little note.
"I was a-going to send you his ears, too," it read, "only our top
sergeant didn't seem to think that ears was a nice thing to send a
lady."
* * * * *
A chapter of this book could easily be confined to the
episodes--sometimes discouraging and at other times highly amusing--in
the personal histories of the canteen workers, both men and women. There
were many times when girls rode eight miles in camions to their work,
and many of these girls who were well used to limousines and who knew
naught of trucks until they came to France. Often those were the lucky
times. For there were the other ones, too, when there was a shortage of
camions and a woman must pull on her rubbers and be prepared to walk
eight or ten miles with a smile on her face, and after that was done to
be on her feet for eight long hours of service. It was a hard test, but
the American girls stood it.
There were the women in the little out-of-the-way canteens who struggled
with coal which "acted like coagulated granite," to quote the words of
one of them, and refused to ignite, save by patience and real toil.
There were long hours on station platforms feeding men by passing food
through car windows because there was not even time for the men to
alight and enter the canteens. Moreover, the soldiers had a habit at
times of leaving their savings for a canteen girl to send to the folks
at home, and although this was not a recognized official part of their
jobs, and, in fact, involved a tremendous amount of work, the trust was
not refused. The women workers fussed with these and many other errands
while the coffee brewed and the chocolate boiled.
In such canteens as those which at first catered to all of the Allies,
the menus were arranged in favor of the heaviest patronage. For the
visiting _poilus_ there was specialization in French dishes. When the
Italians were expected, macaroni was quite sure to become the _pièce de
résistance_. But for the Yankee boy there has apparently never been
anything to excel or even to equal good white bread, good ham, and good
coffee. French coffee may be good for the French--far be it from me to
decide upon its merits--but to the American doughboy give a cup of
Yankee coffee, cooked, if you please, in Yankee style. On such a
beverage he can live and work and fight. And perhaps some of the
marvelous quality of our American fighting has been due in no small
measure to the good quality of our American coffee.
* * * * *
Birds will sometimes revisit a country torn and swept bare by war--even
as Picardy and Flanders have been torn--and so do the flowers creep back
gently to cling to the earth's torn wounds--the shell holes, the
trenches, the gaping walls, seeking to cover the hurts with their soft
camouflage of green and glowing color. The tenderest sight I saw in
bruised Péronne--Péronne which seemed so terribly hurt, even when one
came to compare it with Cambrai, or St. Quentin, or Noyon--was a little
new vine climbing up over the ruins of the parish church; and I thought
of the centuries that the vines had been growing over the gothic
traceries of Melrose Abbey. Flowers gathered by the American Army served
to decorate the waysides of France. The folk of that land have no
monopoly of sentiment. Indeed I have often wondered if ours might not
also have been called the sentimental army as well as the amazing army.
"I know why I am here," said a doughboy who was passing through Paris on
his way toward leave in the south of France, and when some one asked him
the reason, he replied:
"Because I am fighting for an idea. Our President says so."
I have disgressed--purposely. We were speaking of the flowers of France,
which grow in such abundance in her moist and gentle climate. The very
flowers that the boys of the A. E. F. picked when their trains were
halted at the stations--or sometimes between them--were ofttimes given
out by the Red Cross canteeners to other A. E. F. boys in far greater
need of them. For these were the little costless, priceless tributes
which were handed to the wounded men in the hospital trains that came
rolling softly by the junction stations of the United States Military
Railroad. And great, hulking men, who perhaps had given little thought
at other times to the flowers underfoot, then tucked them in their
shirts. Men blinded by gas held them to their faces.
* * * * *
"Wayside!"
The very word holds within its seven letters the suggestion of great and
little adventures. It really is the traveler's own word. Is it not,
after all, the special property of the wanderer, who reckons the beauty
of the world not by beaten paths alone but by nooks and bypaths? To the
vocabularies of stay-at-homes or such routine folk as commuters, for
instance, it must remain unknown--in its real significance. The troops
which journeyed across France from the ports where our gray ships put
them down--the laborers, the poets, the farmers, the business men who
found themselves welded into a great undertaking and a supreme
cause--will never forget the waysides of France. I mean the waysides
that bore over their hospitable doors the emblem of the Red Cross and
the emblem of the Stars and Stripes side by side. Sheltered in the
hustle and bustle of railroad stations, in the quiet of château gardens
beneath century-old trees and within Roman walls, they offered rare
adventures in friendliness, in tenderness, in Americanism.